


Antiphon

by illwynd



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Norse Bro Feels, POV Jane Foster, Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 13:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2111241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Glimpses of the brothers' relationship through Jane's eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antiphon

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [my tumblr](http://illwynd.tumblr.com/post/94026138105/i-really-wanted-to-be-able-to-write-things-for) for the [Thor/Loki week](http://thorlokiweek.tumblr.com/prompts) prompt "platonic relationship"

The first time Jane comes awake in the skiff, it is at Loki’s shout and the immediately following sound of a crash.

 _They’re fighting_ , she thinks distantly. She knows it shouldn’t surprise her. In the brief moments they’d had on the way out of Asgard, Thor had seemed to try to tell her with his eyes that working with his brother was the only choice, but he hadn’t really seemed happy about it. He’d seemed resigned and anxious but determined to do what had to be done. She shouldn’t be surprised that things aren’t going well between them. She wants to lift her head—no, she wants to bolt upright and yell, she wants to slap Loki again for hurting Thor, _make_ him just sit down and shut up and do what they want him to do—but she’s too tired. Too weak and dizzy, the strange energy buzzing around inside her somehow making her sick and exhausted and hardly able to think. She opens her eyes just a slit and sees Thor shoving himself away from his brother. Loki stays where he is. Says something she can’t quite catch, and then, somehow, they smile at each other ruefully, subsiding, almost laughing. The fight is over.

Jane is asleep again in moments.

*

Fire in her veins, a slow fuse, dark sparks coming off it in coils. How disappointing to think that she will never understand how it works or why it’s happening, that all she can do is feel it as it gets closer and closer to killing her.

*

The second time something breaks through into Jane’s doze it’s not because it’s loud but because it’s tense. The voice—Thor’s—takes a while to resolve into actual words, and Jane’s mind gives her only the abridged version: he’s asking Loki why. He’s asking how things got so bad between them. He’s trying to make Loki own up to at least part of the blame, but mostly he’s asking why.

There’s a silence so long that Jane’s eyes are able to open, to focus on their shadows. They’re standing at arm’s length from each other, silhouetted against the sky.

Loki’s answer is evasive, angry, twisting away and trying to shut Thor out.

Thor pushes him again, and she’s honestly surprised that both their voices don’t snap like a wire under too much strain. But they don’t. They don’t start fighting again. 

And Loki doesn’t really answer.

“Tell me the rest of your plan,” he says, cutting off the line of conversation and dragging it off sideways, but the tension is still there in every syllable that reaches Jane’s ears.

She can hear Thor sighing. Both their voices drop low. Too low to make out. And then just the drone of the skiff and the whisper of the wind.

*

Whatever was in her veins has spread across the sky, red and black and empty, burning and in pain.

*

The third time, Jane realizes she has been listening to it for a while, not really awake but not really sleeping, either. It’s like a foreign language—she’s heard Thor mention the All-tongue and she wonders for a second if it’s gotten messed up somehow, because she hears the words like someone singing just a little too far away to understand, all rhythm and no clarity—but then she recognizes it.

Once, when she was eleven, her best friend’s family offered to take her along on a long weekend to their summer cabin. Jane was an only child. She had never before experienced a car trip with two parents and four kids all trying to find a way to pass the time, the world humming by under the wheels and green-tinted sunlight flickering over them all through the canopy of branches lining the highway. But she remembers it now.

It’s a game. A word game, maybe, or something simpler. Something they have known since they were children. Loki says something, Thor answers, adds his own part, and Loki answers that again. Back and forth. An oceanic lull, comforting as a heartbeat, familiar as breathing. Echoes overlapping, rising and falling. It’s not a fight. Not thrust and parry, not this time.

There’s a contentment in both their voices that Jane never realized was missing before. There’s a happiness in Thor’s, and the only way to describe the sound is that it sounds like the look of light shining on something gold. Jane isn’t sure what she means by that, but even with the fuse still burning away inside her, she tries to stay awake a little while longer, just to listen, because it’s beautiful, and she has the strangest feeling that she might never hear it again.

*

She’s clear-headed again. The fire is gone. Thor’s plan worked, at least well enough to get the Aether out of her—and Loki was part of that. He’d kept his promise. Loki had thrown her to the ground and thrown himself across her as the shards flew like shrapnel. Jane feels weird knowing that. But better. Definitely better now.

*

Jane thinks about how she had done everything Frigga said. She was on another world, and this woman was the queen, and Jane _liked_ her and hoped Frigga would like her too, and she’d said “yes ma’am” and promised she would do as she was told—but Jane didn’t really understand the plan. And she hadn’t really expected what she saw when she came out of her hiding spot. The blood on the floor. She’d never thought that someone like Frigga would die for her.

It was strange, watching a king clutching his dead wife’s body.

Jane had stayed back, a feeling of burning guilt keeping her quiet, quiet enough to pretend she wasn’t there. It wasn’t really her fault—it was Malekith’s fault—but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel it.

She is just as quiet now.

“There is no time to bury him,” Thor says after a while. It’s maybe been too long already. They need to move, they need to get moving to do something about the Dark Elves and the Aether, but Thor is still slumped there with his dead brother in his arms and she can’t bring herself to tell him so. Thor looks absolutely miserable. More tears drip down his cheeks as he forces himself to go on. “I will have to leave him here.”

“He’d…” Jane’s voice feels rusty. She doesn’t think she should say anything at all, but she wants to offer some kind of comfort. “He’d understand.”

Thor makes no answer. He kisses Loki’s face again before he lays him down for the last time, and Jane can just barely hear him murmuring something. She doesn’t try to make out the words; it would feel too disrespectful to even want to know what he’s saying. But the rhythm of it feels familiar, like maybe something she’s heard before.

Thor waits just another moment, just another heartbeat. But the response he’s waiting for never comes, and at last he turns away.


End file.
